One activity I love to do is walking my two dogs along Ulster’s many rail trails. As Hurley residents, we often walk along Hurley’s Rail Trail, and enjoy the new connection between Hurley and Kingston. We frequently venture further afield, including favorites such as the Rosendale trestle, the Rail Trail Café, Walkway Over the Hudson, Ashokan Rail Trail, Sojourner Truth State Park and, of course, Kingston’s rail trail, which I helped to brand as the Kingston Greenline.

These trails usually offer splendid opportunities to enjoy local neighborhoods and natural beauty, as well as to reflect on local history, such as railroads, mining, agriculture, cement and timbering industries. While the health and enjoyment benefits of using the trails may be self-evident, its economic and traffic benefits are more complicated than a recent report suggests.

The Ulster County Trails Advisory Committee, established by the Ulster County Legislature, just published its 2024 State of the Trails Update. It’s the first update since 2020, and shares a number of fascinating datapoints. It states that our “shared-use” trails (usually flat, often converted historic railroad or canal corridors) currently receive about 1.4 million visits per year, which is double the volume from only 4 years ago, according to the committee’s last report. It’s an astonishing rise in trail usership, but not surprising considering the impact of COVID. And while the report doesn’t clarify exactly the total length of all shared rail trails in Ulster, my calculations come to roughly 150 miles in length today, with stated plans to grow it substantially more over the coming years.

The report tells us that for “every $1 investment in trails for physical activity [it] produces $2.94 in direct medical benefits,” but it doesn’t say how this metric was calculated. Indeed, the report is light on numbers all around. It claims that local trails generate $17 million in “direct economic benefit” each year through a kind of local snack economy but again, it’s unclear how those metrics were established. I’d be curious to know what kind of snacks trail users purchase — doughnuts and coffee, or kombuchas and harmless harvest organic chia smoothies? Maybe that will be in their next report.

Since the Advisory Committee sought to call out the economic benefits of the trails, one would have thought some transparency on the costs would have been included in the report. Nowhere does it state how much we are spending overall to build, maintain, upgrade and repair the trails. It literally contains almost no mention of costs. The public is entitled to know how much this growing network receives in direct and indirect tax money, grants, bonding, donations and other financial and operational arrangements. And keep in mind, every dollar donated to the trails is potentially a dollar redirected from other worthy causes, like animal welfare, children and food insecurity. Ulster County is not infinitely wealthy.

Speaking of snack benefits, there’s no mention in the State of the Trails report on how we can grow the economic impact of the overall trail system. The committee seems satisfied with citing chips and soda purchases as adequate economic synergy. It doesn’t ask how local business, especially small enterprises, can embrace these wonderful community assets and better integrate the trails within our local economy. Some trails do better than others on this, but overall, the trails operate as ventures unengaged with their surrounding business communities. That’s not surprising given the lack of business representation on the Ulster County Trails Advisory Committee. There are a few examples of direct or indirect business engagement with trails, such as The Walkway Over the Hudson, Rail Trail Café and the Water Street Market in New Paltz. But while the Trails Advisory Committee’s report was pleased to cite that our local trails’ economic impact is a whole $17 million, in a county whose total GDP is over $9 billion — meaning the local trail’s economic contribution represents 0.19 percent of the total county economy — it’s barely a rounding error.

Another thing that is touched upon in the report — and of increasing concern throughout our county — are the injuries and even deaths relating to bike and pedestrian vs. motor vehicle incidents on our roads. Anyone who has ever played the video game “Sim City” learns of a phenomenon called “induced demand.” Induced demand essentially means that when you build more roads, it makes more people want to use them (e.g. adding more lanes to a highway usually results in just bigger highways clogged with congestion). This goes for trails as well. The more we build, the more people will use them. We are inviting demand and use.

Our trails are indeed popular, but with unexpected results. This includes the growing use of all our local roads for biking and walking, whether it’s wise or not. State law gives bikers and pedestrians equal access to our roads, but are they safe to do so? With our expanding trail system, we are inadvertently encouraging the growing use of our local roads, some of which are clearly dangerous for bikers and pedestrians.

One example of this growing problem is on the stretch of Route 375 connecting West Hurley to Woodstock. Any local will tell you that it’s a dangerous road. It’s very curvy with low visibility, no shoulders, trees close to the road and many hidden driveways and streets. Yet increasingly, 375 is being used by bikers and pedestrians, even at night, seeking to transit between Woodstock, Route 28, the Ashokan Rail Trail and Kingston. I frequently see cyclists, without helmets or brightly colored clothing, ride in the middle of the road, and I wince every time as I fear for their lives. Our noble goal of creating an expansive trail system is putting added pressure on our infrastructure and road system — and inadvertently putting people in danger. This is another cost we must account for in future trail planning. We should assess the impact of our beloved trail system on our infrastructure and determine all the needed upgrades for the additional bike and pedestrian traffic to make them safe. And we need to calculate the costs, both in public and private monies.

As an avid user of our local trails, along with my pups, I am not opposed to their existence whatsoever. However, our leadership needs to be more transparent about the costs and impacts upon our communities by being host to a growing system of trails. Additionally, the stewardship of these trails would be wise to more robustly engage with our local business community to better plan and serve trail visitors and sustainably grow our local economy, including jobs, tax revenue and local wealth. And very importantly, we need to have a conversation about the growing use of Ulster’s roads by cyclists and pedestrians. If we are inviting people to enjoy our trails and roads using bikes and walking, we owe it to the public to at the least begin region-wide planning to scale for multi-modal road use. We need to plan carefully to protect our walkers, bikers and car drivers as we see greater traffic. We owe it to those who have already lost their lives, those who have been injured and for those whom we may save in the future.

Raleigh Green is a local business owner specializing in marketing communications consulting and services. If you enjoy this column, please “like” it on social media and share online.